For years it’s been apparent that interpreting games and their makers through the opposed lenses of gameplay or story is inadequate. Such a one-dimensional spectrum breeds false oppositions (fun-or-art?) while either ignoring many games that don’t fit or reinterpreting them so they fit badly. The spectrum is too reductive and, while it is easy to summarise, it leaves out too much context

I recently attended a talk by a gamification proponent who presented a fragmented and ill structured theory on what gamification can bring to a product. He arrived at the right conclusions, but due to the long and winded road he took there. the audience was generally unwilling to accept the fine finale of his talk. In the end, he dismissed gamification as the surface-scratching marketing tool that it currently is, proposing a focus on “game thinking” instead. Because he failed to come up with a convincing definition of that phrase, I thought I should step in and deliver one. Mine is based on “design thinking”[1], a term popular in design theory. I’m quite familiar with design theory because it was the foundation of all our research at the university department I researched, taught and worked at before entering the exciting world of the games industry.